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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Food miles and distance

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: <activism98201@verizon.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Food miles and distance
  • Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:20:00 -0500 (CDT)

I'd like to stress the point of transportation becoming a tipping point.

If not for all the private vehicles paying all those road taxes the cost of
transporting via trucks would be, if not impossibly expensive, incredibly
expensive. As people start driving less (which WILL happen) the cost of
goods transported will start to skyrocket.

Remember that "tipping point" is slightly to one side of center/middle. The
Guardian recently published an article
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2196435,00.html) stating that Peak
Oil occurred last year (2006).

Reformulating hubs, as Dan points out, will be imperative.


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA


=====================
From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>

I commented somewhere else about this article. It doesn't consider the
economics of local foods properly, and all of the factors that go with
centralized management of resources. Local food is basically a long-term
thinking issue, not an immediate ecological or global economic one
(which is how we get 'efficiency' experts to take over our food supplies).

In the long term, diversified food supplies and distributed labor forces
will be necessary as the trucking companies go out of business from the
high costs of fuels. If we think about switching to train
transportation, it is better to have local places for people to take
their products (these used to be called 'towns') for the train to pick
them up. This whole interstate and massive road system is designed by
city-based thinking, where everyone is supposed to live in ever-larger
cities, sucking the life out of the land through a network of roads and
pipelines.

If you reverse that system, the cities have little to offer the land
that can be delivered through pipelines or roads, whereas a distributed
population of people has a lot to offer the land in terms of husbandry.

The local foods movement isn't about the food as much as it is about
having local people who are valuable to the land, but that's too
abstract for the news to report.

Dan Conine
Belgium,WI




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